Career planning

Are you thinking about your next step? Here are some resources to help you—but of course, talking to your advisor, your peers, and people further in their career is also a good place to start!

Timeline: If you are considering getting your next job in academia, you should preferably start looking into this late spring/early summer a year before your current job finishes, as most application deadlines are in the fall of the year prior to the start of employment. 

A lot of useful information can be found on the Institute intranet: 

https://kunet.ku.dk/faculty-and-department/math/hr/career/Pages/default.aspx

Take also a look at Dan Margalit’s page on jobs (aimed at the US job market, but with much useful material, also for non-US applications)

https://margalit.droppages.net/tsr/jobs.html

There exists also subject specific workshops for job applicants.

Collected thoughts from GeoTop meetings over the years:

- Go to conferences during your PhD to meet people, so you know who you might like to work with.
- Think about where you would be happy to live, but don’t be too selective
- Consider applying for fellowships (you should where to go, Danish salary, valuable experience to apply), eg. DFF or Marie Curie fellowships, but don’t bet everything on that since success rate may be low.
- Job talk: prepare you talk like a colloquium talk (especially for tenure-track positions), and check ahead of time who the audience might be. Give practice talks and ask for help/feedback. People around you will be happy to do it!
- Show interest in being a good citizen of the department, especially for tenure-track positions (wrt teaching, student projects, activities,…).
- Be ready to talk about what you could imagine longer term: where would you like to be mathematically in 5 years? Where do you imagine the field will be in 10 or 20 years?
- CV: highlight publications, talks, teaching experience
- Research statement: simple, rigorous with highlighted self-contained theorems of yours (with citations in the bibliography) and questions/conjectures. Try to stay within about 5 pages.

About non-academic jobs:

- A few tips from Matthias Grey and Chris Cave (GeoTop meeting June 24, 2021)

- Mikala Jansens' thoughts about work life outside academia (GeoTop meeting May 15, 2025).